NO REPLAY OF 2000, TV NETWORKS PLEDGE

As the major television networks prepare to cover Tuesday's election, they insist that there will be no replay of the catastrophic failures of 2000, when every network wrongly projected Al Gore the winner of Florida, only to retract that call and later -- again wrongly -- award the state and the White House to George W. Bush.

But the system that the networks will use to project races this year is, despite improvements, fundamentally the same one that produced the mistakes of four years ago, according to interviews with network executives and election analysts, as well as the experts the networks have hired to design and administer the system on Election Day.

And some critics of the networks' performance in 2000 say improvements to the system do not go far enough in ensuring that wrong calls will not get made.

"The reality of the mistakes they made seem to dissolve like sugar in coffee," said Joan Konner, dean emerita of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and one of the authors of a highly critical independent review of the 2000 episode commissioned by CNN. "They just go away."

In interviews with the Tribune, network decision desk analysts, executives and anchors insisted that significant reforms have been made, and that no matter what the computer system they will use to predict the outcome tells them, they intend to err on the side of caution.

"We're all aware of what happened in 2000, and none of us wants to make that mistake again," said Tom Hannon, who, as CNN's political director, will oversee the network's decision desk, where election results will be analyzed and predictions made on Tuesday.

"This is going to be a very close election," said Linda Mason, the CBS News executive who will monitor the decision desk. "If it's close, we're not going to call. And so we'll have a long night and maybe a long couple of days."

But in spite of an intense wave of criticism that followed the 2000 debacle, including congressional hearings and internal investigations into procedures for when and how to call a race, the networks will use the same tools to project winners shortly after the polls close, and before the actual vote is counted, that they used four years ago. They will likewise continue the competitive practice of each network racing to make its own calls. And though the networks have claimed that the complex computer models used to interpret voting data are completely different, they are, according to the man who designed them, subtly improved versions of the old models.

On Tuesday -- barring an election where every state is too close to call -- every network will use exit poll data, as they did four years ago, to project winners in races before the votes are tallied. The polls, which are conducted by 1,500 researchers nationwide as voters leave polling sites, are designed to assemble a representative sample of voting in each state. Fed into statistical models and combined with vote counts from sample precincts, they are used to project winners.

The exit polls were also a major cause of the errors of four years ago, according to the CNN report by Konner, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Ben Wattenberg and Stanford professor emeritus James Risser.

"Cease the use of exit polling to project or call winners of states," the report recommended. "[It] will never be as accurate as a properly conducted actual vote count, and the current network practice of sacrificing accuracy to speed should be reversed."

The report cited numerous problems with exit polls, from declining response rates (people are less and less willing to talk to pollsters as they leave voting sites) to wildly inaccurate estimates in some states -- in Alabama, for instance, exit polls showed Gore leading by 1.2 percentage points in 2000, when Bush carried the state by 14.9 points. Moreover, the report said, using exit polls introduces the possibility, however remote, of a disastrous bad call, all for the sake of getting a few hours' jump on the actual count.

The polls will be funded by the National Election Pool, a consortium of all the broadcast and cable networks and The Associated Press. The NEP replaced Voter News Service, a similar consortium that took much of the blame for the 2000 errors, and was dissolved after the 2002 congressional elections. It funds two projects: The collection of exit poll and sample precinct vote data, which is being done by the research firms Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research, and the tabulation of the actual vote count, which will be handled by AP.

Defenders of exit polling point out that they are almost never used alone to project a race. Rather, they are just one stream of data into a model that takes into account the actual vote from sample precincts, historical voting data, and, if the networks wait long enough before making a call, the actual returns as votes are counted. Besides, the potential for error can be accounted for.

Still, some experts are not persuaded. John Zogby, CEO of the polling firm Zogby International, said that, because the use of samples always carries the risk for error, it is irresponsible to use them in telling voters who actually won an election.

"I don't think exit polling should be used to project winners at all, ever," he said. "Exit polls are a wonderful tool for doing what they were designed to do -- tell us who voted and why. As a tool for projecting an election? No."

According to Warren Mitofsky, a longtime election expert who virtually invented exit polling in 1967 and is heading up the NEP's exit-polling operation: "If the race is wide open, then an exit poll is more than enough to tell you who has won it. If the margin is closer, then it's not reliable, and that's why you wait for sample precinct data."